Pulmuone Crab Noodle Soup

Noodle flavour: Crab

Country of origin: Korea*. Though Pulmuone** has a Chinese factory, the writing on these is Korean.

Cooking instructions:  I have no idea. These were the first noodles ever to come with no English translation of the cooking instructions. There's a single mention of "500ml" which is of course too much water. It's comforting to know that whatever language the noodles are cooked in, they'll always be like a Steps video featuring one member who is too fat to repeatedly stop a horse on camera, with too much H to woah***.

Flavouring packets: Three. And they're HUGE. Dried veg, dark thick paste and red soup base.

Overall:  Let's begin with the noodles themselves: they are like the singing at an Embrace concert, unusually flat. That shouldn't make much difference but it really does give you a surprisingly satisfying mouth feel as you eat, a surprisingly superior slurp.

The soup base could be called a Shoop base, because it's a decent salt and pepper hit. But the shellfish is the big boss in town here, stamping all over the other flavours, drowning out everything else, like a bad opinion on micro-blogging website Twitter.

This soup is like Nigella Lawson**** after she's walked miles on an empty stomach only to discover the gastro pub she wanted to eat at is shut, in that it is nice looking but surprisingly crabby. Helped on by actual dried crab bits in with the dehydrated vegetables and a heavy amount of seafood flavouring - the ingredients claim extract, mussel extract and squid extract - this is definitely the most successful attempt at a shellfish soup to come out of a packet that I have ever tried.

Somehow though, and I think it may be a lack of acid, these noodles like a Russell Mael solo album, lack a spark. The noodles are great, the soup is terrific but they fail to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Sometimes, food, like a blow up mattress, just lets you down slightly. And if this blog teaches you one thing it's that you really don't need to worry about being slightly let down.

If these noodles were a crime novel they would be: The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. You're not really sure what's going on, it all feels a bit weird, it's all very enjoyable but you're never going to mention it on whatever the crime novel version of Desert Island Discs is.

Noodle rating: 3.5/5

*  Really, I owe you readers an apology. After harping on about how I buy my noodles in a specific place on Seven Sisters Road which I never actually named or pinpointed, I then went out to Tottenham Court Road on my way to Warren Street, saw a sparkling Korean shop with tons of noodles and bought a whole new load from a different place.  This is where I normally do my purchasing.






** When researching the Pulmuone corporation, I discovered they have this video on their front page. I've no idea what's going on but it's also strangely comforting that this sort of corporate banality is completely global.

*** This needs to be said out loud to work. And yes, it does work. Definitely.

**** Choose your own person here. I really don't mind. Only thought of Nigella because we're talking about food here. I bet she doesn't walk to the pub that often but I didn't want to get tied down into some kind of debate about it all. You get the picture: It's an attractive person.